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Critical struggle-Ananya Vajpeyi

Recently, the Indian Council of Social Science Research, the highest body that funds and guides the social sciences in India, has initiated an in-house debate about the current state and the future prospects of such research. What is the quality of work that has come out of our universities and research institutes over the past 10-20 years? Which new areas of inquiry deserve more time, money and attention in the coming years? Are Indian social scientists based in this country (and not in foreign universities) producing important work? Is there a high standard of publications — books from academic presses, articles in refereed journals — and are there good PhDs in the pipeline, that can be published in time?

The ICSSR has invited eminent social sciences and humanities scholars, across the disciplines from economics and statistics to sociology, political science and anthropology, to history, philosophy, literature, cultural studies and psychology, to chart a possible course for their areas of research in the next decade. This is by all accounts an enlightened way to proceed, and the entire academic community should not only welcome this initiative, but participate wholeheartedly.

What stops us dead in our tracks, though, is the kind of crisis that seems to engulf institution after institution in the social sciences and humanities in this country. I got my doctoral degree in 2004; just since then, I have watched aghast as mentors, colleagues and friends have struggled to do their work as scholars, experts and administrators, besieged at every step by political brinkmanship, governmental interference, benighted policy changes, bureaucratic hurdles, and outright corruption. As I have personally witnessed and known, such difficulties have arisen not only in colleges, universities and institutes in smaller cities, but in apex and centralized bodies like the National Knowledge Commission, the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Nalanda University, the institution responsible for preparing the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi and, most recently, the National Council of Educational Research and Training.

In the eye of a storm at the moment are Professors Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar, leading political scientists and authorities in the study of democracy and democratic processes, notably elections, political parties and reservation policy, who are or have been attached to institutions like the University of Pune, Lokniti (and especially its National Election Studies), the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, NCERT, ICSSR, the National Advisory Council of the Right to Education Act, the Equal Opportunity Commission of the Government of India, and the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Professor Yadav won the prestigious Malcolm Adishesiah Award in 2008, for his contribution to development studies. He is a well-known face on television, where he appears as a psephologist (elections-analyst) during every major state or parliamentary election for the past many years. He played an active role in the debates and movements around the Jan Lokpal Bill throughout 2011.

The question is this: What place do social science experts have in our public life? If sitting governments and political classes across the spectrum are not going to let experts do their work, then why appoint them to positions where apparently their expertise is required? Professors Yadav and Palshikar have on Friday, May 11 resigned from their advisory role at the NCERT where they, together with Professors Mrinal Miri and G.P. Deshpande, helped write, approve and prescribe school textbooks in the social sciences.

These resignations remind us of innumerable such resignations by one eminent scholar after another who found himself or herself first placed in a position where it appeared that one needed to have a command over one’s discipline, but then in the face of intimidation by some pressure group or other, the government caved in and made scapegoats of the very people whose knowledge and experience it ought to have used to strengthen its stand. Far too many men and women who are undoubtedly brilliant, highly qualified, deeply knowledgeable, unimpeachably ethical, and moreover thoroughly committed to public service, have been treated in this shoddy manner by a government that values neither its institutional, nor its human, resources.

If I look only at persons I know well, their awful experiences in trying to be proactive citizens and in attempting to put their specialized skills and hard-earned credentials at the service of the country drive me to despair. There must be many more such persons whom I don't know, struggling in their jobs all over India, trying to make a difference, hoping in some shape or form to affect the shape of policies and programs that touch hundreds of millions of lives. In the on-going Shankar cartoon controversy, the real issue is not whether Ambedkar or Nehru are mocked in this particular case, but what kind of understanding of social inequality we want our children to have; what history of India’s founding principles, efforts at nation-building and constitutional democracy we want to impart to the younger generation.

Is it even thinkable that these two individuals, Yadav and Palshikar, who have spent their entire lives studying and teaching about democracy, elections, affirmative action, state, society, politics and nation in India, would want to desecrate the legacy of B.R. Ambedkar through some insidious form of insult and mockery? That they deliberately chose an offensive cartoon and slipped it into schoolbooks decades after the fact, just to put Ambedkar down? Is it conceivable that an entire committee of university professors, school teachers, researchers and translators, coming from different parts of India and different social backgrounds, trained exactly in the subjects at hand, just got it all wrong?

Babasaheb Ambedkar is one of India’s founding fathers, first among equals, who played an extraordinary part in bringing questions of equality, fraternity and justice to the top of the new nation’s agenda. He made equal citizenship possible for this once-colonized and utterly hierarchical country. His legacy does not belong exclusively to any group or community. He made India and its Constitution what they are — together with others, naturally, including Nehru and the entire Constituent Assembly — but the work Ambedkar did as the chairman of the drafting committee has an impact on all of our lives every single day.

Yes, Ambedkar also embodied a struggle that defined ‘untouchables’ as a modern political community, and transformed them into Dalits and in many cases Buddhists. But this special historical role that he played does not, in any way, detract from his significance to each and every Indian, whether Dalit or not. Shankar’s cartoon — which shows Nehru and Ambedkar trying to speed up the Constituent Assembly, that is crawling at a snail’s pace — captures a moment in history, in 1949, when the three years it had taken to write the Constitution must have seemed very long and the nation was impatient for the final outcome. It does not insult Ambedkar. The textbook that includes it does not insult Ambedkar. Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar most certainly do not insult Ambedkar.

What we ought to find insulting, to us, the people of India, is the behaviour of a government, a ruling party and a Parliament that thinks we do not have the capacity to read and evaluate our own past and present; that we cannot laugh at ourselves through satire, comedy and humour of various kinds; that we have no critical faculties, no historical memories, no love for our own greatest leaders and heroes, and worst of all, no political judgment. On Monday, May 14, the Lok Sabha was unanimous in asking that a number of textbooks in the social sciences be withdrawn, and all the cartoons and illustrations in them be reconsidered. Why? Because they make fun of politicians? Who says we don’t have the right to make fun of our elected representatives in a democratic dispensation? Will the entire National Curriculum Framework, so painstakingly hammered out by the best minds, be called into question now?

The insult to Ambedkar comes from a political leadership that does not understand or respect the fundamentals of democracy, equality, representation, dissent, debate and freedom. Moreover, this regime is anti-intellectual and undermines all social science, its practitioners and its institutions. In this way it impugns the life’s work of Babasaheb Ambedkar, who was one the greatest scholars, intellectuals and political thinkers that India produced in the 20th century, in addition to being the leader of the Dalits.

Aamir Khan’s new TV show, Satyameva Jayate, has aired twice as I write this column. The program has focused on two issues of immense importance that affect everyone and are never openly discussed — sex selective foeticide and and child sexual abuse. In revealing the horrifying inhumanity of our conventions and practices, and the extent of the moral and cultural degeneration of collective life in India, Khan does us all a great service. But why do we need a film-star to hold up a mirror to our flawed and fractured polity and society? That is the work of social scientists, and they should be allowed to do it without fear or favour.